Washington: Elon Musk has waded back into the political fray, slamming a major domestic policy bill that Senate Republicans are scrambling to pass weeks after he ended a feud with US President Donald Trump over the legislation.
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, GOP leaders released a new 940-page version of the legislation to carry out the president’s agenda. Like the House version, the bill would slash taxes, scale back Medicaid, cut nutritional assistance and increase spending on the military and immigration enforcement.
Elon Musk had been relatively quiet since his blow-up with the president this month.Credit: AP
But the Senate also included new measures intended to mollify holdouts in the Republican ranks, including a fund to help rural hospitals that depend on Medicaid.
Leaders in the Republican majority are hoping to push the bill through the Senate and win final approval in the House before Trump’s deadline of July 4.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, had been relatively quiet since his blow-up with the president this month, but as the Senate convened to discuss the package Saturday afternoon, he re-entered the debate, calling the bill “utterly insane and destructive” in a post on his social platform X.
“The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country!” he wrote.
The bill lies at the centre of his feud with the president. Musk had said he believed that the package would significantly add to the national debt and would undermine the savings he claims were found by the department of government efficiency, a federal government cost-cutting project he led.
He called the bill a “disgusting abomination” that would make the country bankrupt.
